Orthern Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Beyond Toward a Thick Description of Style

Originalveröffentlichung in: Chatenet, Monique (Hrsg.): Le gothique de la Renaissance : actes des quatrième Rencontres d'Architecture Européenne, Paris, 12 - 16 juin 2007, Paris 2011, S. 47-64 N orthern Gothic, Italian Renaissance and beyond Toward a thick description of style Stephan Hoppe In 2004, Hellmut Lorenz drew attention to several Central European works of architecture for which the common dichotomous taxonomy of « Gothic » or « Renaissance » as a stylistic category did not seem to function convincingly as a distinction1. Among others, Lorenz pointed to the aedicule on the Bautzen gate tower commissioned by King Matthias Corvinus (1486) (fig. 1) and some of the portals of the Cracow Wawel Castle (ca. 1520/25) (fig. 2) as examples of a « style between the styles ». These were works of architecture on which branch work (Astiuerk), at the time a new development in ornamentation, was closely linked with classical motifs such as columns and entablature details : « Frappierend bleibt die langanhaltende asthetische Faszination an der Verbindung der kiinstlerischen AusdruckmOglichkeiten der beiden Stile, die als Kontrast wie auch in gleichsam amalgamierter Form auftreten konnte. [...] Die Frage ist zu stellen, ob das Fach Kunstgeschichte mit der charakteristischen Eigenart dieser Kunstwerke in angemessener Weise umgegangen ist - und die Antwort darauf kann schwerlich positiv ausfallen » 2. (It is surprising that there has been a long-lasting aesthetic fascination with the combination of the expressive possibilities of the two styles, which could appear as a contrast or in an amalgamated form, as it were [...] We must ask whether the discipline of art history has indeed dealt appropriately with the characteristic distinctive character of these works of art. The answer can hardly be positive). A main reason for this epistemological deficit in regard to a clear and unambiguous classification is probably due to the fact that the stylistic categories « Gothic » and « Renais sance » have tended to be viewed by modern art history since the nineteenth century as formal systems imbued with their own autonomous logic3. Almost in direct analogy to natural scientific classifications, they were attributed with fixed non-variant essential phenomenolo- gical characteristics. In the case of Gothic style, for example, that includes lancet arches, high flying buttresses and dissolution of the solid wall. The Renaissance is associated with 1. LORENZ 2004. 2. LORENZ 2004, p. 44. 3. See the critics: Hermann Hipp, « Die "Nachgotik" in Deutschland - kein Stil und ohne Stil», in HOPPE, MOLLER AND NUBBAUM 2008, p. 14-46 ; Josef A. Schmoll genannt Eisenwerth, « Stilpluralismus statt Einheitszvvang - Zur Kritik der Stilepochen-Kunstgeschichte », in Werner Hager, Norbert Knopp (ed.), Beitrage zum Problem dcs Stilpluralismus, Munich, 1977, p. 9-19; Robert Suckale, « Die Unbrauchbarkeit der gangigen Stilbegriffe und Entwickluhgsvorstellungen. Am Beispiel der franzSsischen gotischen Architektur des 12. und 1 3. Jahrhunderts », in Friedrich Mcibius, Helga Sciurie (ed.), Stil und Epoche. Petiodisiemngsfragen, Dresden, 1989, p. 231-250 ; Jan Biaostocki, « Zum Modusproblem in den bildenden Kunsten » (first published 1961), in Stil und Ikonographk. Studien zur Kunstwissenschafl, Cologne, 1981, p. 12-42 ; Stephan Hoppe, « Stil als Dunne oder Dichte Beschreibung, Eine konstruktivistische Perspektive auf kunstbezogene Stilbeobach- tungen unter Beriicksichtigung der Bedeutungsdimension », in HOPPE, MuiXER AND NUBBAUM 2008, p. 48-103. 48 / Stephan Hoppe rounded arches, an orientation to classical pillar motifs, horizontalism, stress on the tectonic structure or on volume and cubic capacity as style-defining elements. From the purview of this model, we have « pure Gothic » and « pure Renaissance » wherever the individual factors merge in an especially stringent manner into a formal system ; that is exemplified in the case of the cathedrals of the He de France in the thirteenth century or in the rebuilding and transformation of St. Peter's in Rome in the sixteenth century. But in cases such as those cited by Lorenz, where the buildings clearly deviate from such ideal images, combining within themselves elements of both styles, the scholarly question of weighting and importance often depends on prior premises which shape the basic classification. The present paper follows an alternative path for exploring and better grasping this phenomenon. The core criterion is not the relatively close approximation of an ideal image, but rather the cultural context of the original situation of genesis of the fields of classification. This can be utilized to help interpret style. In the early 1970s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz drew attention to a similar problem in his own discipline of ethnography, and his methodological thoughts on this subject, grouped under the general metaphorical label of « thick description », have been a topic of extensive discussion since4. But in the field of the history and analysis of art, this has to date not been the case. Geertz utilized ideas from the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who pointed out in connection with winking that independent of the material physical fact of moving the eyelids, such a phenomenon only becomes understandable if viewed as a part of human culture, and is integrated back into the context of meaning-making and social semiosis5 : Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch ; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identical ; from an I-am-a-camera, « phenomenalistic » observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way : (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particular, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle points out, the winker has done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial signal is winking. That's all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of culture, and - voila I - a gesture 6. In terms of this example, a thin description would center on noting the eyelid movements of the two boys as a physical event, on this plane far removed from semiosis, and quite indistinguishable in their physicality. Only by including the symbolic dimension do we get a thick description, where the activities of the two boys are very different. Transposed to phenomena of architectural history, this means that an analysis remains in the mode of thin description when it is solely an effort to determine the formal characteristics of an object. Only when an attempt is made to reconstruct the concrete circumstances in the specific life worlds involved can we speak about a thick description. In the case of architectural styles, this could mean including contemporary contexts of meaning in raising questions about what is Gothic, what is Renaissance. In regard to the problem of style interpretation, that also means we have to include contemporary conceptions about the stylistics of classical archi- 4. GEERTZ 1973. 5. Gilbert Ryle, « The Thinking of Thoughts. What is "le penseur" doing ? » in Collected papers Vol. 2., Bristol, 1990, p. 480-496 (first published : University lectures no. 18, 1968 [Saskatoon]). 6. GEERTZ 1973, p. 4. Northern Gothic, Italian Renaissance and beyond tecture. Assessing the object under focus oriented to the actual world of antiquity as we know it today is insufficient when it comes to a thick description7. However, it is quite difficult to reconstruct cultural elements of meaning and historical conceptions drawn solely from individual buildings ; the buildings scarcely still « speak » their original language in the presence of today's observers. It appears necessary to search for further sources for cultural contexts. Initially, such a search does not appear promising, since there are hardly any known relevant textual commentaries pertaining to the architectural works of the Northern Renaissance, unlike the situation for the same time period in Italy. We have no knowledge of the existence of programmatic texts for the aedicule of the Bautzen or the Cracow portals, nor are there any such extant texts for most of the other structures which Lorenz mentions. For that reason, I propose embarking down a pathway that to date has been seldom traveled, but where one can build on far richer material. Pictorial sources will be tapped from closely related cultural contexts in which certain architectonic motifs and principles appear in a context rich in content, in this way casting additional needed light on contemporaneous ways of dealing with variants and dichotomies in style. Due to the brevity of the present article, only a few examples can be presented and evaluated here8. Two phenomena of architecture north of the Alps around 1500 will be given special consideration : the reception of stylistic characteristics from the Romanesque period and the use of branch work, i.e. the substitution

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